When you join a social network you may wonder if the information stored is secure from criminal intent. But what you may not think about is that the information you give freely could lead to theft of your online identity, possibly your real life identity also!

Who you are, where you live

When you join a social network like Facebook that depends on so much of your real life information you could be opening yourself up to virtual identity theft. Any visitor or passing acquaintance has easy access to your bithdate, what you look like, your family members, city you live in and much of your daily life. All it takes is for a person with the wrong intentions to take advantage of the situation.

Not really MySpace

On MySpace.com it is not uncommon to find out that the person holding an account in a certain name is not really that person. MySpace tries to prevent this from happening by requiring the victim of the name theft to send in an image of themself with the address and name of the stolen space. But what they are really doing is helping identify the person because it is done publically. Once the the victim has been properly identified by their process they can potentially become susceptible to even more criminalistic acts. Identification should be kept private.

Your online reputation

We have to face a fact. Online reputations are becoming a big deal. Ask "fake Steve Jobs" about it. In many branches livelyhoods and businesses are totally dependant on the personality exhibited online. So we are not able to just ignore our virtual selves and write them off as being worthless digitalisation.

As we come closer to quantifying reputation, the identities we use in online communities begin to have real-world value. A top-ranked member of a network like eBay might be able to sell more items than his peers. A high-karma user on a site devoted to legal issues could have a tremendous influence over public policy. According to social networks analyst Clay Shirky, identity spoofing is possibly the greatest threat to social discovery networks. "When your reputation is valuable, it becomes worth exploiting. It makes a stolen identity a more valuable commodity."

Off-line

While there have been no reported real-life identity theft case that started out as virtual theft. We are not too far away from making it possible. So when you join a community of any type think about who you are before commiting to exposing your real life personality. Be suspicious and question any community as to why they need to know so much about you when the only thing you want to do is play a few flash games.

Happy Publishing!

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